Sometimes, for no real reason, I’ll use the closed captioning feature on my television. I’ve noticed that on occasion the audio says something completely different from what the closed captioning subtitle says. For instance, on a recent episode of South Park about Cartmans Trapper Keeper, the robot says: “It worked. I don’t exist”. But the captioning reads: “Goodbye. Oh, oh, it hurts”. WTF!? 
Why is this? Are the CC people just playing jokes?
try watching the news.
now get completely fubar and watch the news.
see witch one seems closer to the audio
IIRC, the closed captioning people receive one of the final versions of the shooting script to caption. The difference between the final shooting script and the final script is a matter of editing and minor changes, so additions/deletions of lines often reflect that. Many times, fans of shows will watch with CC on so as to see any changes in the dialogue.
Also, they occasionally take it upon themseves to paraphrase. Jerks.
I watch a lot of sports live in bars, and many of them have the CC enabled. The errors are fast and furious, and sometimes hilarious.
At the same time, I have a buddy who is working for a company that is trying to create streaming, realtime Congressional hearing coverage for the Internet. It works like this:
A live feed is fed to a computer (in this case, I believe it is a dedicated dual-Pentium III Xeon 750 with 512 MB RAM–yes, I am a geek). That computer uses a sophisticated voice-recognition software to interpret the feed (ahem, probably DragonSoft). At the same time, the feed goes to a person wearing headphones who monitors the computer’s output and makes necessary corrections. Theoretically, the computer can learn from these corrections, but I wouldn’t be suprised if they don’t compound the problem by correcting it for obscure references.
I suspect a very similar version of the process occurs during Monday Night Football or CNN election coverage. The most egregious errors occur at regular intervals. I suspect that’s when the CC person has to say “hell with it” because his three-to-seven second delay envelope is compromised and cannot keep up with the errors.
Even though the whole discrepancy has been explained by Andygirl…I thought I’d throw out a funny one in the movie Aladin. When Aladin is talking to Jasmine on the balcony and the genie has taken the form of a bee. You hear this whispered “all teenagers take off your clothes.” Naturally this wasn’t in the script, and the CC says something else (I can’t, for the life of me, remember what…but it’s something really stupid that doesn’t sound at all the same." Just a little movie/CC trivia. 
No you don’t actually hear that. You just think you do. snopes has it covered as usual.
On a related note, subtitles for foreign films are also often wrong, paraphrased, or just plain hilarious.
From a Chinese porn flick:
“Oh! Oh! Sway harder at lower part!”
and
“It pouring like pear juicy.”
Also noticed that watching American films here in Korea with subtitles can be confusing… sometimes the dialogue will be something like “OK, let’s go! Louie, you get the car… Frankie, get the Tommie guns…” and on the bottom of the screen, in Korean, it will just say “Ung!” (Korean for “yeah”)…
andygirl has it half right.
Anyway, first & foremost is that there are several closed captioning comp’s. Each one decides how they want to caption a program so the script fits & what to do with idioms.
Some, the ones I like, caption exactly what is said, others think that its cute to chop up the captions so they fit (they have to be done so an average person can read at that speed). Thus, they often chop out key words & take some liberty with idioms.
Captioning is not cheap. They say it takes 40 man hours per hour of captioning. You can get the captioning software & card to it yourself. Im surprised it hasn’t got much cheaper in 10 years, its around $1500.00
The biggest captioning comp is the USA Dept of Education. They caption anything but XXX. They would caption NR-17.
I never found a xxx flick that was captioned. There was rumor in the 80s that Suzy Superstar XXX was but the box did not have a caption logo on it.
Another funny glitch is when they use “stock footage” on the news. They typically do a voiceover on it relevant to the current event they’re covering, but the close captioning is typically for the dialog which originally went with the clip. So you might hear something like “This was the largest action by protestors in China since the Tienneman Square massacre”, but see something like “Yesterday, in Tienneman Square, the Chinese military attacked peaceful demonstrators with tanks”.
One time I was watching “Bobby’s World” (a cartoon on Fox a few years ago) and nearly every line was messed up. Different words, misspelled words, and gibberish with random characters thrown in. Someone please explain what happened here.
Once I turned on the captions while watching Kids in the Hall. In one sketch, the word “cunnilingus” was bleeped out in audio, but appeared in the captions. I guess deaf folks aren’t as prone to corruption as we hearing types.
I’m assuming you watched last night’s (Saturday’s) episode. There’s a very good reason why the audio and text didn’t match up. I don’t know why, but Comedy Central slightly changes/changed South Park episodes played Wednesday before they’re played on Saturday. I distinctly remember watching the aforementioned episode Sunday with the robot saying “Oh, oh, it hurts,” followed by Kyle (?) saying “That’s a b____.” But when I watched it on Saturday, they had changed it and he just said “It worked, I don’t exist,” followed by Kyle’s line. It is apparent they kept the closed captioning from Wednesday’s episode and played it with Saturday’s dubbing.
If the South Park example is the only one you can think of like this, this problem is probably much smaller than you think.
Sometimes the cheap local news simply sucks captions off a teleprompter. Thus, you see things like SOT, AB LIB, etc.
Another amusing (well, to me) one, also South Park related:
You know how when there’s background noise, the CC will say something like “dogs barking” or “children laughing?” If you watch the “Uncle F*cker” song on the South Park movie DVD with closed captioning turned on, it’ll alert you to “rhythmic farting.”
I don’t know why that makes me laugh. I should probably be ashamed of myself.
Don’t be ashamed, Rosebud, I busted out laughing just reading your post!
Jman
“rhythmic farting.”
During prime time they refer it to as a ‘raspberry’ in lower case.
I LOVE closed captioning! when my son is babbling on about something while I’m trying to watch TV, or my wife picks that moment to call someone on the phone, I can turn the sound down and still follow the action.
Also, once I recorded an episode of “The Practice” and the tape went squirrely…if you just pushed “play” it wouldn’t show anything, but I discovered that if I played it at slightly faster-than-normal speed I could see the picture. Unfortunately, the sound didn’t function in fast-forward mode. CC to the rescue!
Here’s an example of screwed up CC from “The Lion King.” It’s the scene when Timon and Pumbaa are teaching young Simba how to eat bugs. Timon crunches one up and says, “piquant (i.e., spicy), with a very pleasant crunch.” The person who did the CC had apparently never heard the word “piquant” and rendered it “pecans, with a very pleasant crunch.”
tangential remark: Anyone see “galaxy quest” on DVD? They have an alternate audio track that is some alien gibberish…it’s hilarious to watch for a bit. Then it gets irritating.
Nah, depends on the captioner.
Number one was probably NCI, so it would be:
{RHYTHMIC FARTING}
Number two is probably WGBH, so it would be:
(raspberry)
except in Italics, I can’t make them.
I’ve seen WGBH use fart and variants of the word.